Bear Witness, An Old Shame

So, I'm writing a novel where one of my characters is a gangster and has amnesia from as an after affect from using his innate demi-god powers. He spends a lot of his recuperating and paid vacation time watching all kinds of movies at the theater and he likes to quote from said movies. None of the movies are real. I did this as a challenge because you're not writing a fantasy world that isn't Earth and including quotes from The Godfather, or Titanic because it would take you out of the story. So I used one from my brother's fortune cookie he got a couple days ago because it actually says:

You will always have good luck in you. Personal affairs.

So I decided the not very useful advice is bad dialogue from a movie called Personal Affairs because the second sentence is such an afterthought as to be like it was quoting from something. This got me into busting out my old folder: Debt To Hollywood, a dead project and old shame where I was going to make a story about timeless Hollywood following the filming and backstage politics of a studio and its actors, directors, producers and whatever. I knew I had to have written some mock movie titles and plot synopsis's somewhere for my amnesiac gangster to quote from. Most of these files span from 2013 and January of 2014. I dumped this project after and then by the end of October, I abandoned all projects I was working on completely and formulated a new project from scratch for my first Nanowrimo where I wrote manuscript over 60k words and never looked back.

One of the better fake movies I wrote I intended to be a dumb action revenge movie starring my Clint Eastwood expy. It's called Bear Witness and in retrospect it sounds like a parody of The Revenant, which I've never watched.

Bear Witness

In the Alaskan wilderness, a scientist toils away in his lab when the other scientists barricade his fortress and accuse him of the murder of his wife and fellow scientist. In an act of cruel and unusual punishment, they strand him in the snowy tundra with an angry bear who he soon finds out had mauled his wife the night before, after she dumped chemical waste in the river killing the bear's family. After the two grief stricken widowers have a fight to the death in the snowy tundra, the man barely (heh) escapes alive to return to the compound. The other scientists forgive him after he explains his story. To save the compound from a raid of deadly bears, the man must wear a fur suit and disguise himself as one of them to infiltrate their lifestyle. After the bear sniffs him out he takes his grenade at the bear and walks away from the fiery blaze.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, A Film Review

I saw Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets yesterday and I liked it in spite of not liking the two leads. When the production credits segued into the beginning prologue to Bowie's Space Oddity, I got chills and sang.

My brother and I were the only people in the theater which means it's probably a box office bomb and no sequels will be made, but I enjoyed being able to talk and point out details. I've honestly not read the source material, but I've had the translated graphic novel collections (all probably incomplete and edited unfortunately) sitting on my Amazon account for years now, but I've honestly not bought anything on Amazon in over a year because I don't have a steady income so I can't compare it, but I will say that they should have cast leads that didn't feel like twentysomethings playing young adult teenage protagonists. It was jarring.

These are shallow complaints honestly, but Dane DeHaan ladies man status seemed informed than shown. Cara Delevingne came off better than in Suicide Squad, but I still don't like her as an actress and honestly would have preferred Rihanna with an age appropriate male lead. Scarlet Johansson with her Avengers look would have looked accurate to Laureline in the comics, but that's nitpicky and none of us really want to see her keep getting roles anyway after that Ghost In The Shell debacle.

What I liked about the film is that it proves you can do a space opera with tons of nonhuman aliens that isn't Star Wars. A lot of comparisons will be drawn to Star Wars and Fifth Element, which the director lifted a lot of design elements from the original comics. To get it out of the way yes the original Valerian and Laureline comics predate Star Wars so their ship resembling the Millennium Falcon is the source material and changing it to modernize it, or kill comparisons is sort of inauthentic. I like that they kept a lot of the retro feeling that probably is in the source material instead of foregoing it for bland apple sleek futurism, or whatever is in for portraying the future now. The sprawling cities made up in the satellite not only remind me of Fifth element, they remind me of paintings of Trantor from Isaac Asimov's Foundation books. That's a good thing because I fear that if Foundation ever got adapted we're stuck with modern sleek with no definitions. Everything looks lived in Valerian, most set designs for the future, or the past don't. They looked pasted on and sparse.

The plot isn't anything amazing, or world bending, but it's the adventure that I liked and it teaches a moral lesson of foregoing protocol when an injustice is made. When the bad guy of the film says he's a soldier and will take genocide over humiliation, (paraphrasing, I know i have some words off) you wanted him to get it.

Another thing I liked that will bother people is the nineties style writing and dialogue. It was refreshing. I watch a lot of films from my childhood that would now be called out for bad writing because people have earnest emotions and say what they mean and then ridiculous stuff happens that escalates, or fixes a sticky situation and they don't break the fourth wall and turn snarky over it. If Cara Delevingne rolled her eyes less like a poor man's Emma Stone, or Dane DeHaan did more than ape Keanu Reeves's speech patterns it would have felt more classic.

Of course there's probably a lot of things people especially on tumblr would have a discourse over, like Valerian housing a woman's soul. I as a transmale didn't find it offensive, but it's not for me to say how a transwoman would feel about that. Things relating to the body and mind become a tricky (hate that fucking word) or, problematic in sci-fi fantasy when you factor that in. It's why I see Ready Player One failing with it's avatar controversies in an age of social media dictating that you answer for your identity on a constant basis. Rihanna's character will definitely bother people. Herbie Hancock doesn't get enough to do. The relationship between Valerian and Laureline will bother people too among other things I can think of.

Anyway, I don't regret seeing this movie and will probably own it if I see it discounted. I would like for some sequels to happen, but it's not going to happen because we can't have cool things. I wish we could have more space opera's that aren't Star Wars, Star Trek, or Marvel. I think this movie does way better than what a lot of people complained about Jupiter Ascending lacked. It's just a shame it isn't perfect enough to garner another chance and we probably won't see another space opera property outside of the big three for another decade, or more because of diminishing returns and then we're back to lazy post-apocalypse, tired teenage dystopias, boring cyberpunk and isolation, stuck in a spaceship survivor genres.

By the way I saw the preview for A Wrinkle In Time and and I know people are going to hide their racism behind unnecessary creative liberties arguments. Unnecessary creative liberties would be aging up Jonas four years in The Giver so he can have hormonal teenage angst and making it in color because people can't sit through the art direction of Schindler's List and Sin City, so his seeing color loses meaning, or how it had to be scored because people need to be bombarded with sounds constantly instead of daring to see a cinematic experience that could challenge you, or make you feel unsettled.

Meg was cast to look thirteen as the books. That's promising. So all the complaints about how Oprah shouldn't materialize and be a shining light with a disembodied voice is a nitpick. That's a necessary change because I've long learned that masking named actors backfires. That's why all superheroes barely wear their masks if they have them at all. It was wasteful of Star Wars to waste Lupita Nyong'o as a voice under motion capture, at that point anyone can do the role. Valerian at least showed us Bubble's two forms, Rihanna and blue squishy alien. I think about the fact that Julia Roberts in Hook had to have a lot of closeups to justify her being Tinker Bell because she'd otherwise be a glowing silent light.

Chester Bennington, A Retrospective As A Brief Fan

Though I don't want to admit it, I've been thinking a lot about Chester Bennington and Linkin Park in the last few days. Honestly, I haven't followed the band since Meteora. I think I gave the next album a listen and I don't remember it's name, nor do I care to look it up, but I remembered it was bland and didn't have the fire of their previous efforts. Some time after, they did a song for the Transformers soundtrack and became a laughing stock.

Before all of that though, I loved this band. They were what I could follow when Korn was taking forever to release a follow up to Issues and when they did, it sucked so hard. My father took me and my siblings to see Linkin Park at Cobo Hall, Detroit where I got to see them from a balcony. Adema opened and Cypress Hill was there too. At that point in time they hadn't even released Meteora yet, but I think they were working on it. They played off album cuts like My December and High Voltage which I bought as four track single on cd just to have even if it was a ripoff. My siblings and I used to scavenge download sites for demo's and outtakes which I'd burn to a cd and listen to. One of them I remember was named Carousel. I'd find songs from Chester's time in some obscure band called Grey Daze and I admit I enjoyed What's In The Eye a lot even though it sounded nothing like Linkin Park. I remember a live song that was something like Wake Me In The Morning After, a couple years ago my friend had Underworld, or was it Gothica? on and it had that song on the end credits.

I'd still say Hybrid Theory was their best effort. They had limited budget and time making that album and I liked it more than Meteora, which was their last good effort from what I've listened to since. Reanimation may be one of the best remix albums I've ever owned.

It's hard to say what drove me towards their music. Part of it had to with the sound collages maybe the depression and angst spoke more to me than I care to admit. I'd always tell my rational mind that I don't hear voices in my head, or that I don't have mental issues outside of learning disabilities. That the artists I listened to felt real pain and I don't. Of course that's bullshit, but it's been my long coping mechanism to deny anything wrong with me and think I'm okay. I'm not saying that I've never had suicidal thoughts, but that I mask it as a wish I was never born sentiment because you don't admit you'd be selfish enough to leave your loved ones behind after how many years and resources they poured into you, but unexisting is okay because they'd be none the wiser and had never spent the money and hardship ensuring your continual existence. So even if I theoretically thought I should go off myself, my anxiety would get in the way of doing it. Admitting that I've thought this out loud makes me real antsy because we don't talk about these notions.

We live in a society that treats suicide as the ultimate taboo. You don't admit to that train of thought, or sympathy towards those who take it further. You just don't. It's considered cowardly, selfish, sinful and we don't talk about it except to scorn the dead and move on, while continuing to curse their name if brought up. It's why I think adapting Thirteen Reasons Why was a stupid move. You can't tell that story because the answer's always, suicide's bad. There's nothing interesting, or though provoking you can do with the subject because of it's limitations. It has none of the complexity and grey areas as taking another life.

One thing that keeps ringing through my mind from my time on Tumblr. There's so many posts that try to assure us that we don't owe others our emotional welfare, our bodies, our existence, but doesn't the taboo against suicide say otherwise? Perhaps I'm making some fallacy here, but the argument against suicide always boils down to the people dependent on you that you screwed over offing yourself. You screwed them of financial support, of emotional welfare, of love, and showers of hugs and kisses, consultation, conversations and experiences. It always boils down to that.

At the end of the day I have no judgement on Chester Bennington, or his fans, or naysayers, but everybody else I know will. I know if it had been a drug overdose this would have been more divisive than what it is. We're not supposed to say he's no longer suffering. We're supposed to say he's burning in hell for what he did to his family, and what he did against perceived spiritual intentions.

In the end it doesn't even matter anymore. His family's opinions about this matter more than our collective experience as fans, moralizing naysayers and trolls.